^^^ 

.•S17 



THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC. 

Its Dangers and its Possibilities. 



AN ORATION 



DELIVKKED BY 



HENRY GEORGE, , 

In the California Theatre, San Francisco, on the Celebration 
OF the- 4th of July, 1877. 



Mr. President. Ladies and Gentlemen : 

It is under circumstances tliat inspire gratitude and renew 
patriotism that we celebrate the completion b}'- the American 
Republic of the first year of her second century. How 
much that year has held of the possibilities of dire calamity 
it may be too soon to speak. But for the deliverance let us 
give thanks. Through the web woven by passion and pre- 
judice has run the woof of a beneficent purpose. Through 
clash of plans and conflict of parties; through gateways 
hung with cloud and by paths we knew not of, have we come 
to this good estate ! 

As, when the long struggle was over,' the men of the 
Revolution turned to pour forth their thanks to Him in 
whose hands are the nations, so let us turn to-day. Last 
year was the Centennial; but this year, if we read the times 
aright, marks the era, and with 1877 will the historian, in 
future ages, close the grand division of our history that 
records the long, sad strife of which slavery was the cause. 
Most gracious of our national anniversaries is that we keep. 
Never before has the great Declaration rung through the land 
as to-day. For the first time have its words neither fallen on 
the ears of a slave nor been flung back by a bayonet-guarded 
State House ! 



ill 








[2] /«?] 

For year after year, while they who won our independence 
faded away; for year after j^ear, while their sons grew old, 
and in their turn taught us to light the altar fires of the 
Kepublic, at every recurring anniversary of the nation's 
birth, the unexpressed thought of an inherited curse that 
was sowing the land with dragon's teeth, checked the pride 
and gave to the rejoicings of the thoughtful a somber back- 
ground, and between thunder of gun and voice of trumpet, 
the black shadow of a great wrong mocked in silence the 
burning words that protested to the world the inalienable 
rights of man. To this there came an end. In the deadly 
close of civil war, when all fierce and wicked passions were 
loosed, while the earth shook with the tread of fratricidal 
armies, and the heavens were red with the blaze of burning 
homes, amid the groans of dying men and the cry of stricken 
women, the great curse passed away. But still the shadow. 
Could we boast a Union in which State Governments were 
maintained by extra-State force, or glory in a republic whose 
forms were mocked in virtual provinces ? 

But all this is of the past. The long strife is over. The 
cancer has been cut out. And may we not also say to-day, 
that the wound of the knife has healed ? To-day we cele- 
brate the nation's birth, more truly one people than 
for years and years. Again in soul as in form, the many are 
one. Over palmetto as over pine floats the flog that typi- 
fies the glory of our common past, the promise of our com- 
mon future — the flag that rose above the blood-stained snow 
of Valley Forge, that crossed with Washington the icy 
Delaware — the flag that Marion bore, that Paul Jones nailed 
to the mast, that Lafayette saluted ! Over our undivided 
heritage of a continent it floats to-day, with the free will of a 
united people — under its folds no slave, and in its blue no star 
save that of a free and sovereign State. And, as in city 
and town and hamlet, to-day, has been read once more 
the declaration of a nation's birth, again, I believe me, in 
the hearts of their people, has Adams signed with Jefferson 
and Rutledge with Livingston, pledging to the Republic, 
one and indivisible, life and fortune and sacred honor! 

Beside me on this platform, around me in this audience, 
sit men who have borne arms against each other in civil strife, 
again united under the folds of that flag. Men of the South 
and men of the North, do I not speak what is in your hearts, 
do I not give voice to your hope and your trust, when I say 
that the Union is again restored in spirit as in form — not a 
union of conquerors and conquered, but the union of a peo- 
ple — one in soul as one in blood; one in destiny as one in 

^n'tajje! 



13J 

Let our dead strifes bury their dead, while we cherish the 
feeling that makes us one. Let us spare no myrrh nor frank- 
incense nor costly spies as we feed the sacred fire. It is 
not a vain thing these flags, these decorations, these miles of 
marching men. Stronger than armies, more potent than 
treasure is the sentiment of nationality they typify and in- 
culcatej^ 

Yet to more than the sentiment of nationality is this day 
sacred. It marks more than the birth of a nation— it marks 
a step in the progress of the race. More than national in- 
dependence, more than national union, speaks out in that 
grand document to which we have just listened; it is the 
declaration of the fundamental principle of liberty — of a 
truth that has in it power to renovate the world. 

It is meet that on this day the flags of all nations should 
mingle above our processions and wreathe our halls. For 
this is the festival of her to whom under all skies eyes have 
turned and hands been lifted — of her who has had in all 
lands her lovers and her martyrs — of her who shall yet unite 
the nations and bid the war drums cease ! It is the festival 
of Liberty! 

And in keeping this day to Liberty, we honor all her sacred 
days — those glorious days on which she has stepped forward, 
those sad days on which she has been stricken down by open 
foes, or fallen wounded in the house of her friends. Far 
back stretches the lineage of the Eepubiic a.t whose birth 
Liberty was invoked — from ever}' land have been gathered 
the gleams of light that unite in her beacon fire. It is 
kindled of the progress of mankind ; it witnesses to heaven 
the aspirations of the ages ; it shall light the nations to yet 
nobler heights ! 

Let us keep this day as the day sacred to Union and to 
Liberty should be kept. Let us draw closer the cords of 
our common brotherhood and renew our fathers' vows. Let 
it be honored as John Adams predicted it would be honored 
— with clangor of bells and roar of guns, v.'ith music and 
processions and assemblages of the people, with every mark 
of respect and rejoicing — that its memories of glory may 
entwine themselves with the earliest recollections of our 
children, that even the thoughtless may catch something of 
its inspiration ! 



Yet it is not enough that with all the marks of veneration 
we keep these holidays. It is possible to cherish the form 
and lose the spirit. 



[41 

No matter how bright the lights behind, their usefulness 
is but to illumine the path before. Whatever be the causes 
of that enormous difference — almost a difference in kind — 
between the stationary and the progressive races, here is its 
unfailing indication — the one look to the past, the other to 
the future. The moment we believe that all wisdom was 
concentrated in our ancestors, that moment the petrifaction 
of China is upon us. For life is growth, and growth is change, 
and political progress consists in getting rid of institutions 
X we have outgrown. Aristocracy, feudality, monarchy, slavery 
— all the things against which human progress has been a 
slow and painful struggle— were, doubtless, in their times 
relatively if not absolutely beneficial, as have been in later 
times things we may have to cast away. The maxim com- 
mended to us by him who must ever remain the greatest 
citizen of the Republic — " Eternal vigilance is the price of 
liberty," embodies a truth which goes to the very core of 
philosophy, which must everywhere and at all times be true. 
Ever and ever we sail an unknown sea. Old shapes of 
menace fade but to give place to othefs. Ever new rocks 
lurk ; ever in new guise the syrens sing ! 

As through the million-voiced plaudits of to-day we hear 
again the words that when first spoken were ominous of cord 
and gibbet, and amid a nation's rejoicing our pulses quicken 
as imagination pictures the bridge of Lexington, the slender 
earthworks of Bunker Hill, the charge of tattered Continen- 
tals, or the swift night-ride of Marion's men, let us not think 
that our own times are commonplace, and make no call for 
the patriotism that, as it wells up in our hearts, we feel would 
have been strong to dare and do had we lived then. 

How momentous our own times maybe the future alone can 
tell. We are yet laying the foundations of empire, while 
stronger run the currents of change and mightier are the 
forces that marshal and meet. 

Let us turn to the past, not in the belief that the great 
men of the past conquered for us a heritage that we have 
but to enjoy, but that we may catch their heroic spirit to 
guide and nerve us in the exigencies of the present; that we 
may pass it on to our children, to carry them through the 
dangers of the future. 

Now, as a hundred years ago, the Eepublic has need of 
that spirit — of the noble sensitiveness that is jealous for 
Freedom; of the generous indignation that weighs our con- 
sideration of expediency against the sacrifice of one iota of 
popular right; of the quick sympathy that made an attack on 
the liberties of one colony felt in all; of the patient patriot- 
ism that worked and waited, never flagging, never tiring, 



[5] 

seeking not recognition nor applause, looking only to the 
ultimate end and to the common good; of the devotion to a 
high ideal which led men to risk for it all things sweet and 
all things dear ! 

We shall best honor the men of the Eevolution by invok- 
ing the spirit that animated them; we shall best perpetuate 
their memories by looking in the face whatever threatens the 
perpetuity of their work. Whether a century hence they 
shall be regarded as visionaries or as men who gave a new 
life to mankind, depends upon us. 

For let us not disguise it— republican government is yet 
but an experiment. That it has worked well so far, deter- 
mines nothing. That Republican institutions would work 
well under the social conditions of the youth of the Eepub- 
lic — cheaj) land, high wages and little distinction between 
rich and poor — there was never any doubt, for they were 
working well before. Our Revolution was not a revolution 
in the full sense of the term, as was that great outburst of 
the spirit of freedom that followed it in France. The colonies 
but separated from* Great Britain, and became an indepen- 
dent nation without essential change in the institutions 
under which they had grown up. The doubt about repub- 
lican institutions is as to whether they will work when popu- 
lation becomes dense, wages low, and a great gulf separates 
rich and poor. 

Can we speak of it as a doubt ? Nothing in political phi- 
losophy can be clearer than that under such conditions re- 
publican government must break down. 

This is not to say that these forms must be abandoned. 
We might and probably would go on holding our elections 
for years and years after our government had become essen- 
tially despotic. It was centuries after C?esar, ere the abso- 
lute master of the Roman world pretended to rule other than 
by authority of a Senate that trembled before him. It was 
not till the thirteenth century that English kings dropped 
the formal claim of what was once the essence of their title 
— the choice of the people ; and to this day the coronation 
ceremonies of European monarchs retain traces of the free 
election of their leader by equal warriors. 



But forms are nothing when substance has gone. And our 
forms are those from which the substance may most easily 
go. Extremes meet, and a republican government, based 
on universal suffrage and theoretical equality, is of all govern- 
ments that which may most easily become a despotism of 



[6] 

the worst kind. For there, despotism advances in the name 
of the people. The single source of power once secured, 
everything- is secured. There is no unfranchised class to 
whom appeal may be made; no privileged orders, who in 
defending their own rights may defend those of all. No bul- 
wark remains to sta}- the flood, no eminence to rise above it. 

And where there is universal suffrage, just as the disparity 
of condition increases, so does it become easy to seize the 
source of power, for the greater is the proportion of power 
in the hands of those who feel no direct interest in the con- 
duct of the government, nay, who, made bitter by hardships, 
may even look upon profligate government with the sort of 
satisfaction w^e may imagine the proletarians and slaves of 
Rome to have felt as they saw a Caligula or Nero raging 
among the rich patricians. 

Given a community with Eepublican institutions, in which 
one class is too rich to be shorn of their luxuries, no matter 
how public affairs are administered, and another so poor 
that any little share of the public plundejr, even though it be 
but a few dollars on election day, will seem more than any 
abstract consideration, and power must pass into the hands 
of jobbers who will sell it, as the praetorian legions sold the 
Roman purple, while the people will be forced to reimburse 
the purchase money with costs and profits. If to the 
pecuniary temptation involved in the ordinary conduct of 
government are added those that come from the granting of 
subsidies, the disposition of public lands and the regulation 
of prices by means of a protective tariff, the process will be 
the swifter. ■* 

Even the accidents of hereditarj' succession or of selection 
by lot (the plan of some of the ancient republics) may 
sometimes place the wise and just in power, but in a corrupt 
^ republic the tendency is always to give power to the worst. 
Honesty and patriotism are weighted and unscrupulousness 
commands success. The best gravitate to the bottom, the 
worst float to the top; and the vile can only be ousted 
by the viler. PAnd as a corrupt government always tends to 
make the richS'icher and the poor poorer, the fundamental 
cause of corruption is steadily aggravated, while as national 
character must gradually assimilate to the qualities that 
command power and consequently respect, that demoral- 
ization of opinion goes on which in the long panorama of 
history we may see over and over again, transmuting races 
of freemen into races of slaves. 

As in England, in the last century, where Parliament was 
but a close corporation of the aristocracy, a corrupt oligarchy 
where it is clearly fenced off from the masses, may 



1 



[7J 

exist without much effect on national character; because, 
in that case, power is associated in the j3opular mind with 
other things than corruption ; but where there are no hered- 
itary distinctions, and men are habitually seen to raise them- 
selves by corrupt qualities from the lowest places to wealth 
and pow er, tolerance of these qualities finally becomes ad- 
miration. A corrupt democratic government must finally 
corrupt the people, and when a people become corrupt, there 
is no resurrection. The life has gone, only the carcass re- 
mains ; and it is left but for the plowshares of fate to bury 
it out of sisht. 



Secure in her strength and position from external dangers, 
with the cause gone that threatened her unity, the Republic 
begins to count the years of her second century with a future, 
to all outward seeming, secure. But may we not see already 
closing round her the insidious perils from which, since her 
birth, destruction has been predicted? Clearly, to him who 
will look, are we passing from the conditions under which 
republican government is easy, into those under which it 
becomes endangered, if not dangerous. While the posses- 
sor of a single million is ceasing to be noticeable in the 
throngof millionaires, and larger private fortunes are mount- 
ing towards hundreds of millions, we are all over the country 
becoming familiar with widespread poverty in its hardest 
aspects — not the poverty that nourishes the rugged virtues, 
but poverty of the kind that dispirits and embrutes. 

And as we see the gulf widening between rich and poor, 
I may we not as plainly see the symptoms of political deterior- 
i ation that in a republican government must always accom- 
j)any it ? Social distinctions are sharpest in our great cities, 
and in our great cities is not republican government becom- 
ing a reproach ?- J\Iay we not see in these cities that the 
worst social influences are become the most potent political 
factors ; that corrupt rings notoriously rule ; that offices are 
virtually purchased — and, most ominous of all, may we not 
plainly see the growth of a sentiment that looks on all this 
as natural, if not perfectly legitimate ; that either doubts the 
existence of an honest man in public place, or thinks of him 
as a fool too weak to seize his opportunity?' Has not the 
primary system, which is simply republicanism applied to 
party management, already broken down in our great cities, 
and are not parties in their despair already calling for what 
in general government would be oligarchies and dictator- 
ships ? 



[8J 

We talk about the problem of municipal government ! It 
is not the problem of municipal government that we have to 
solve, but the problem of republican government. These 
great cities are but the type of our development. They are 
growing not merely with the growth of the country, but faster 
than the growth of the country. There are children here 
to-day who in all human probability will see San Francisco 
a city as large as London, and v\dll count through the country 
New Yorks by the score ! 

Fellow-citizens, the wind does not blow north or south 
because the weathercocks turn that way. The complaints 
of political demoralization that come from every quarter are 
not because bad men have been elected to office or corrupt 
men have taken to engineering parties. If bad men are 
elected to office, if corrupt men rule parties, is it not because 
the conditions are such as to give them the advantage over 
good and pure men ? Fellow-citizens, it is not the glamour 
of success that makes the men whose work we celebrate to- 
day loom up through the mists of a century like giants. 
They were giants — some of them so great, that with all our 
eulogies we do not yet appreciate them, and their full fame 
must wait for yet another century. But the reason Avhy such 
intellectual greatness gathered around the cradle of the Re- 
public and guided her early steps, was not that men were 
greater in that day, but that the people chose their 
best. You will hardly find a man of that time, of high 
character and talent, who was not in some way in the public 
service. This certainly cannot be said now. And it is 
because power is concentrating, as it must concentrate as 
our institutions deteriorate. If one of those men were to 
come back to-day and were spoken of for high position — say 
for the United States Senate — instead of Jefferson's, three 
questions the knowing ones would ask : ' ' Has he money to 
make the fight !" " Are the corporations for him?" " Can 
he put up the primaries?" No less a man than Benjamin 
Franklin — a man whose fame as a statesman and philosopher 
is yet growing — a man whom the French x\cademy, the most 
splendid intellectual assemblage in Europe, applauded as 
the modern Solon — represented the city of Philadelphia in 
the provincial Assembly for ten years, until, ivS their best 
man, he was sent to defend the colony in London. Are there 
not to-day cities in the land which even a Benjamin Franklin 
could not represent in a State Assembly unless he put around 
his neck the collar of a corporation or took his orders from 
a local ring ? 

You will think of many things in this connection to 
which it is not necessary for mo to allude. We all see them. 



% 



[9] 

Though we may not speak it openly, the general faith in re- 
publican institutions is narrowing and weakening — it is no 
longer that defiant, jubilant, boastful belief in republican- 
ism as the source of all national blessings and the cure for 
all human woes that it once was. We begin to realize that 
corruption may cost as much as a royal family, and that the 
vaunted ballot, under certain conditions, may bring forth 
ruling classes of the worst kind, while we already see 
developing around us social evils that we once associated 
only with effete monarchies. Can we talk so proudly of wel- 
coming the oppressed of all nations when thousands vainly 
seek for work at the lowest wages ? Can we expect him, 
who must sup on charity, to rejoice that he cannot be taxed 
without being represented ; or congratulate him who seeks 
shelter in a station-house that, as a citizen of the Republic, 
he is the peer of the monarchs of earth ? 



Is there any tendency to improvement ? 

Fellow-citizens, we have hitherto had an advantage over 
older nations which we can hardly over-estimate. It has 
been our public domain, our back ground of unfenced 
land, that made our social conditions better than those of 
Europe; that relieved the labor market and maintained 
wages; that kept open a door of escape from the increasing 
pressure in older sections, and acting and re-acting in many 
ways on our national character, gave it freedom and inde- 
pendence, elasticity and hope. 

But with a folly for which coming generations may curse 
us, we have wasted it away. Worse than the Norman con- 
queror, we have repeated the sin of the sin-swollen Henry 
VIII; and already we hear in the "tramp" of the sturdy- 
vagrant of the Sixteenth Century, the predecessor of the 
English pauper of this. We have done to the future the un- 
utterable wrong that English rule and English law did to 
Ireland, and already we begin to hear of rack-rents and 
evictions. We have repeated the crime that filled Italy with 
a servile population in place of the hardy farmers who had 
carried her eagles to victory after victory — the crime that 
ate out the heart of the Mistress of the World, and buried 
the glories of ancient civilization in the darkness of medieval 
night. Instead of guarding the public domain as the most 
precious of our heritages; instead of preserving it for our 
poorer classes of to-day and for the uncounted millions who 
must fellow us, we have made it the reward of corruption, 
greed, fraud and perjury. Go out in this fair land to-day and 
yoii may see great estates tilled by Chinamen, while citizens 



[10 J 

of the Republic cany their blankets through dust}- roads 
begging for work; you may ride for miles and miles through 
fertile land and see no sign of human life save the ghastly 
chimney of an evicted settler or the miserable shanty of a 
poverty-stricken renter. Cross the bay, and you will see the 
loveliest piece of mountain scenery around this great city, 
though destitute of habitation, walled in with a high board 
fence, that none but the owner of 20,000 acres of land may 
look upon its beauties. Pass over these broad acres which 
lie as they lay ere man was born on this earth, and under 
penalty of fine and imprisonment you must confine yourself 
to the road, purchased of him with poll taxes of four 
dollars a head wrung from men packing their blankets 
in search of work at a dollar a day. 

Fellow-citizens, the p^^blic domain fit for homes is almost 
gone, and at the rate we are parting with the rest, it is certain 
that by the time children now in our public schools come of 
age, the pre-emption law and the homestead law will remain on 
our statute books only to remined them of their squandered 
birthright. Then the influences that are at work to concen- 
trate wealth in the hands of the few, and make dependence 
the lot of the many, will have free play. 

How potent are these influences ! Though in form every- 
thing seems tending to Republican equality, a new power 
has entered the world, that under present social adjust- 
ments is working with irresistible force to subject the 
many to the few. The tendency of all modern machinery is 
to give capital an overpowering advantage and make labor 
helpless. -Our boys cannot learn trades, because there are 
few to learn. The journeyman who, with his kit of tools, 
could make a living anywhere, is being replaced by the 
operative who performs but one part of a process, and must 
work with tools he can never hope to own, and who conse- 
quently must take but a bare living, while all the enormous 
increase of wealth which results from the economy of pro- 
duction must go to increase great fortunes. The under- 
currents of the times seem to sweep us back again to the old 
conditions from which we dreamed we had escaped. The 
development of the artisan and commercial classes gradually 
broke down feudalism after it had become so complete that 
men thought of heaven as organized on a feudal basis, and 
ranked the first and second persons of the Trinity as Suze- 
rain and Tenant-in-Chief. But now the development of 
manufacture and exchange has reached a point which 
threatens to compel every worker to seek a master, as the 
insecurity which followed the final break up of the Roman 
empire compelled every freeman to seek a lord. Nothing 



[11] 

seems exempt from this tendency. Even errands are run by 
a corporation, and one company carries carpet-sacks, while 
another drives the hack. It is the old guilds of the middle 
ages over again, only that instead of all being equal, one is 
master and the others serve. And where one is master and 
the others serve, the one will control the others, even in such 
matters as votes. 

In our constitution is a clause prohibiting the granting of 
titles of nobility. In the light of the present it seems a good 
deal like the device of the man who, leaving a big hole for the 
cat, sought to keep the kitten out by blocking up the little 
hole. Could titles add anything to the power of the aris- 
tocracy that is here growing up ? Six hundred liveried re- 
tainers followed the great Earl of Warwick to Parliament; but 
in this young State there is already a simple citizen who 
could discharge any one of thousands of men from their 
employment, who controls 2,200 miles of railroad and 
telegraph, and millions of acres of land; and has the power 
of levying toll on traffic and travel over an area twice that 
of the original thirteen States. Warwick was a king-maker. 
Would it add to the real power of our simple citizen were 
we to dub him an earl ? 

Look at the social conditions which are growing up here 
in California. Land monopolized ; water monopolized ; a 
race of cheap workers crowding in, whose effect upon our 
own laboring classes is precisely that of slavery ; all the 
avenues of trade and travel under one control, all wealth 
and power tending more and more to concentrate in a few 
hands. What sort of a republic will this be in a few years 
longer if these things go on ? The idea would be ridiculous, 
were it not too sad. 

Fellow-citizens, I am talking of things not men. Most 
irrational would be any enmity towards individuals. How 
few are there of us who under similiar circumstances would not 
do just what those we speak of as monopolists have done. 
To put a saddle on our back is to invite the booted and spurn r d 
to ride. It is not men who are to blame but the system. 
And who is to blame for the system, but the whole people? 
If the lion will suffer his teeth to be pulled and his cla s to 
be pared, he must expect every cur to tease him. 



But, fellow citizens, while it is true that a republican gov- 
ernment worth the name cannot exist under the social con- 
ditions into which we are passing, it is also true that under 
a really republican government such conditions could not 
be. 



[12] 

1 do uot mean to saj we have not had enough govern- 
ment ; I mean to .say that we have had too much. It is a 
truth that cannot be too clearly kept in mind that the best 
government is that whicli governs least, and that the more a 
republican government undertakes to do, the less republican 
it becomes. Unhealtliy social conditions are but the result 
/of interferences with naturaj rights. 

There is nothing in the condition of things (it were a libel 
on the Creator to say so) which condemns one class to toil 
and want while another live in wasteful luxury. There is 
enough and to spare for us all. But if one is permitted to 
ignore the rights of others by taking more than his share, 
the others must get less ; a difference is created which con- 
stantly tends to become greater, and a greedy scramble 
ensues in which more is wasted than is used. 

If you will trace out the laws of the production of wealth 
and see how enormous are the forces now wasted, if you will 
follow the laws of its distribution, and see how, by human 
laws, one set of men are enabled to appropriate a greater 
or less part of the earnings of the others; if you will think 
how this robbery of labor degrades the laborer and makes 
him unable to drive a fair bargain, and how it diminishes 
production, you will begin to see that there is no necessity 
for poverty, and that the growing disparity of social condi- 
tions proceeds from laws which deny the equal rights of 
men. 



Fellow-citizens, we have just listened again to the Declara- 
tion, not merely of national independence, but of the rights 
of man. 

Great was Magna Charta — a beacon of light through 
centuries of darkness, a bulwark of the oppressed through 
ages of wrong, a firm rock for Liberty's feet, as she still 
strove onward! 

But all charters and bills of right, all muniments and 
titles of Liberty, are included in that simple statement of 
self-evident truth that is the heart and soul of the Declara- 
tion: " That all men are created equal; that they are en- 
dowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that 
among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." 

Li these simple words breathes not only the spirit of Mag- 
na Charta, but the spirit Avhich seeks its inspiration in the 
eternal facts of nature — through them speak not only 
Stephen Langton and John Hampton, but Watt Tyler and 
the Mad Priest of Kent. 



[13] 

The assertion of the equal rights of all men to life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness is the assertion of the right of 
each to the fullest, freest exercise of all his faculties, limited 
only by the equal right of every other. It includes freedom 
of person and security of earnings, freedom of trade and 
capital, freedom of conscience and speech and the press. It 
is the declaration of the same equal rights of all human 
beings to the enjoj^ment of the bounty of the Creator — to 
light and to air, to water and to land. It asserts these rights 
as inalienable — as the direct grant of the Creator to each 
human being, of which he can be rightfully deprived neither 
by kings nor Congresses, neither by parchments nor pre- 
scriptions — neither by the compacts of past generations nor 
by majority votes. 

This simple yet all-embracing statement bears the stamp 
royal of primary truth — it includes all partial truths and co- 
ordinates with all other truths. This perfect liberty, which, 
by giving each his rights, secures the rights of all — is order, 
for violence is the infringement of right ; it is justice, for 
injustice is the denial of right ; it is equality, for one cannot 
have more than his right, without another having less. It 
is reverence towards God, for irreverence is the denial of His 
order ; it is love towards man, for it accords to others all 
that we ask for ourselves. It is the message that the angels 
sang over Bethlehem in Judea — it is the political expres- 
sion of the Golden Rule ! 

Like all men who build on i^uth, the men of the Revolu- 
tion builded better than they knew. The Declaration of In- 
dependence was ahead of their time ; it is in advance of our 
time; it means more than perhaps even he saw whose pen 
traced it — man of the future that he was and still is ! But 
it has in it the generative power of truth ; it has grown and 
still must grow. 

They tore from the draft of the Declaration the page in 
which Jefferson branded the execrable crime of slavery. But 
in vain ! In those all-embracing words that page was still 
there, and though it has taken a century, they are, in this 
respect vindicated at last, and human flesh and blood can no 
longer be bought and sold. 



It is for us to vindicate them further. Slavery is not dead, 
though its grossest form be gone. What is the difference, 
whether my body is legally held by another, or whether he 
legally holds that by which alone I can live. Hunger is as 
cruel as the lash. The essence of slavery consists in taking 



[14] 

from a man all the fruits of his labor except a bare living, 
and of how many thousands miscalled free is this the lot ? 
Where wealth most abounds there are classes with whom the 
average plantation negro would have lost in comfort by ex- 
changing. English villeins in the Fourteenth Century were 
better off than English agricultural laborers of the Nine- 
teenth. There is slavery and slavery ! " The widow," says 
Carlyle, "is gathering nettles for her children's dinner fa 
perfumed seigneur, delicately lounging in the (Eil de Boeuf, 
has an alchemy whereby he "will extract from her the third 
nettle, and call it rent !" 

Fellow-citizens, let us not be deluded by names. What is 
the use of a republic if labcjr must stand Avith its hat off 
begging for leave to work, if "tramps" must throng the 
highways and children grow up in squalid tenement houses ? 
Political institutions are but means to an end — the freedom 
and happiness of the individual; and just so far as they fail 
in that, call them what you will, they are condemned. 

Our conditions are changing. The laws which impel 
nations to seek a larger measure of liberty, or else take from 
them what they have, are working silently but with irresisti- 
ble force. If we would perpetuate the Republic, we must 
come up to the spirit of the Declaration, and fully recognize 
the equal rights of all men. We must free labor from its 
burdens and trade from its fetters; we must cease to make 
government an excuse for enriching the few at the expense 
of the many, and confine it to necessary functions. We 
must cease to permit the monopolization of land and water 
by non-users, and apply the just rule, "No seat reserved 
unless occupied." We must cease the cruel wrong which, by 
first denying their natural rights, reduces laborers to the 
wages of competition, and then, under pretence of assert- 
ing the rights of another race, compels them to a com- 
petition that will not merely force them to a standard of com- 
fort unworthy the citizen of a free republic, but ultimately 
deprive them of their equal right to live. 

Here is the test : whatever conduces to their equal and 
inalienable rights to men is good — let us preserve it. 
Whatever denies or interferes with those equal rights is 
bad — let us sweep it away. If we thus make our insti- 
tutions consistent with their theory, all dilficulties must 
vanish. We will not merely have a republic, but social con- 
ditions consistent with a republic. If we will not do this, 
we surrender the Republic, either to be torn by the volcanic 
forces that already shake the ground beneath the standing 
armies of Europe, or to rot by slow degrees, and in its turn 
undergo the fate of all its predecessors. 



" 15 ] 

Libertyis not a new invention that, once secured, can never 
be lost. Freedom is the natural state of man. " Who is your 
lord ? " shouted the envoys of Charles the Simple to the 
Northmen who had penetrated into the heart of France. 
" We have no lord ; we are all free men!" was their answer ; 
and so in their time of vigor would have answered every 
people that ever made a figure in the world. But at some 
point in the development of every people, freedom has been 
lost, because as fresh gains were made, or new forces devel- 
oped, they were turned to the advantage of a few. 

Wealth in itself is a good, not an evil ; but wealth con- 
centrated in the hands of a few, corrupts on one . side, and 
degrades on the other. No chain is stronger than its weak- 
est link, and the ultimate condition of any people must be 
the condition of its lowest class. If the low are not brought 
up, the high must be brought down. In the long run, no 
nation can be freer than its most oppressed, richer than its 
poorest, wiser than its most ignorant. This is the fiat of the 
eternal justice that rules the world. It stands forth on 
every page of history. It is what the Sphinx says to us as 
she sitteth in desert sand, while the winged bulls of Nineveh 
bear her v.dtness ! It is written in the undecipherable hiero- 
glyphics of Yucatan ; in the brick mounds of Babylon ; in 
the prostrate columns of Persiopolis ; in the salt-sown plain 
of Carthage. It speaks to us from the shattered relics of 
Grecian art ; from the mighty ruins of the Coliseum ! Down 
through the centuries comes a warning voice from the great 
Republic of the ancient world to the great Eepublic of the 
new. In three Latin words, Pliny sums up the genesis of 
the causes that ate out the heart of the mightiest power that 
the world ever saw, and overwhelmed a widespread civiliza- 
tion : * ' Great estates ruined Ital}' ! " 

Let us heed the warning by laying the foundations of the 
Republic upon the work of the equal, inalienable rights of 
all. So shall dangers disappear, and forces that now threaten 
turn to work our bidding; so shall wealth increase, and knowl- 
edge grow, and vice, and crime and misery vanish away. 



They who look upon Liberty as having accomplished her 
mission, when she has abolished hereditary privileges and 
given men the ballot, who think of her as having no further 
relations to the every-day affairs of life, have not seen her 
real grandeur — to them the poets who have sung of her must 
seem rhapsodists, and her martyrs fools ! As the sun i;. the 
lord of life, as well as of light ; as his beams not merely 



n 



[16] 

pierce the clouds, but support all growth, supply all motion, 
and call forth from what would otherwise be a cold and 
inert mass, all the infinite diversities of being and beauty, 
so is liberty to mankind. It is not for an abstraction that 
men have toiled and died ; that in every age the witnesses of 
liberty have stood forth, and the martyrs of liberty have suf- 
fered. It was for more than this that matrons handed the 
Queen Anne musket from its rest, and that maids bid their 
lovers go to death ! 

We speak of liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, 
knowledge, invention, national strength and national inde- 
pendence as other things. But, of all these, Liberty is the 
source, the mother, the necessary condition. She is to virtue 
what light is to color, to wealth what sunshine is to grain ; 
to knowledge what eyes are to the sight. She is the genius 
of invention, the brawn of national strength, the spirit of 
national independence ! Where Liberty rises, there virtue 
grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention mul- 
tiplies human poAvers, and in strength and spirit the freer 
nation rises among her neigiibors as Saul amid his brethren 
— taller and fairer. Where Liberty sinks, there virtue fades, 
wealth diminishes, knowledge is forgotten, invention ceases, 
and empires once mighty in arms and arts become a helpless 
prey to freer barbarians ! 

Only in broken gleams and partial light has the sun of 
Liberty yet beamed among men, yet all progress hath she 
called forth. 

Liberty came to a race of slaves crouching under Egyptian 
whips, and led them forth from the House of Bondage. She 
hardened them in the desert and made of them a race of 
conquerors. The free spirit of the Mosaic law took their 
thinkers up to heights where they beheld the unity of God, 
and inspired their poets with strains that yet phrase the 
highest exaltations of thought. Libertj' dawned on the Phe- 
nician coast, and ships passed the Pillars of Hercules to 
plow the unknown sea. She broke in partial light on Greece, 
and marble grew to shapes of ideal beauty, words became 
the instruments of subtlest thought, and against the scanty 
militia of free cities the countless hosts of the Great King 
broke like surges against a rock. She cast her beams on 
the four-acre farms of Italian husbandmen, and born of 
her strength a power came forth that conquered the world ! 
She glinted from shields of German warriors, and Augustus 
wept his legions. Out of the night that followed her eclipse, 
her slanting rays fell again on free cities, and a lost learning 
revived, modern civilization began, a new world was unveiled; 
and as Liberty grew so grew art, wealth, power, knowledge 



[17] 

and refinement. In the history of everj nation we may . 
the same truth. It was the strength born of Magna Ch& 
that won Crecy and x^Lgincourt. It was the revival of Li 
erty from the despotism of the Tudors that glorified th 
Elizabethan age. It was the spirit that brought a crownea 
tyrant to the block that planted here the seed of a mighty 
tree. It was the energy of ancient freedom that, the 
moment it had gained uuity, made Spain the mightiest power 
of the world, only to fall to the lowest depth of weakness 
when tyranny succeeded liberty. See, in France, all intel- 
lectual vigor dying under the tyranny of the Seventeenth 
Century to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke in the 
Eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of the French pea- 
sants in the Great Eevolution, basing the wonderful strength 
that has in our time laughed at disaster. 

What liberty shall do for the nation that fully accepts and 
loyally cherishes her, the wondrous inventions, which are 
the marked feature of this century, give us but a hint. Just 
as the coijdition of the working classes is improved, do we 
gain in productive power. Wherever labor is best paid and 
has most leisure, comfort, and refinement, there invention is 
most active and most generally utilized. Short-sighted are 
they who think the reduction of working hours would reduce 
the production of wealth. Human muscles are one of the 
tiniest of forces; but for the human mind the resistless powers 
of nature work. To enfranchise labor, to give it leisure and 
comfort and independence, is to substitute in production 
mind for muscle. When this is fully done, the power that 
we now exert over matter will be as nothing to that we shall 
have. 



It has been said that from the very increase of our 
numbers, the American Union must in time necessarily 
break up. I do not believe it. Even now, while the 
memories of a civil war are fresh, I do not think any part 
of our people regret that this continent is not bisected by 
an imaginary line, separating two jealous nations, two great 
standing armies. If we respect the equal rights of all, if we 
reduce the operation of our National Government to the pur- 
poses for which it is alone fitted, the preservation of the 
common peace, the maintenance of the common security and 
the promotion of the common convenience, there can be no 
sectional interest adverse to unity, and the blessings of the 
bond that makes us a nation must become more apparent as 
years roll on. 



[18] 

far from this Union necessarily falling to pieces from 
piercjAvn weight, it may, if we but hold fast to justice, not 
antVrely embrace a continent, but prove in the future capable 
ine a wider extension than we have yet dreamed. 
sr The crazy king, the brutal ministers, the rotten Parlia- 
rment, the combination of tyranny, folly, corruption and ar- 
rogance that sundered the Anglo-Saxon race, is gone, but 
stronger and stronger grow the influence of the deathless 
minds that make our common language classic. The 
republic of Anglo-Saxon literature extends wherever the 
tongue of Shakespeare is spoken. The great actors who 
from time to time walk this stage, find their audiences over 
half the globe ; it is to one people that our poets sing ; it is 
one mind that responds to the thought of our thinkers. The 
old bitternesses are passing away. Yv'ith us the hatreds, 
born of two wars, are beginning to soften and die out, while 
Englishmen, who this year honor us in honoring the citizen 
whom we have twice deemed worthy of our foremost place, 
are beginning to look upon our Kevolution as the vindication 
of their own liberties. 

A hundred years have passed since the fast friend of 
American liberty — the great Earl Chatham — rose to make 
his last appeal for the preservaticm, on the basis of justice, 
of that English-speaking empire, in which he saw the 
grandest possibility of the future. Is it too soon to hope 
that the future may hold the realization of his vision in a 
nobler form than even he imagined, and that it may be the 
mission of this republic to unite all the nations of English 
speech, whether they grow beneath the Northern Star or 
Southern Cross, in a league which, by insuring justice, pro- 
moting peace, and liberating commerce, will be the fore- 
runner of a world-wide federation that will make war the 
possibility of a past age, and turn to works of usefulness the 
enormous forces now dedicated to destruction. 



And she to whom on this day our hearts turn, our ancient 
ally, our generous friend — thank God we can say, our sister 
Republic of France ! It was not alone the cold calculations 
of kingcraft that when our need was direst, helped us with 
money and supplies, with armies and fleets. The grand idea 
of the equal rights of man was stirring in France, her pulses 
were throbbing with the new life that was soon to shake the 
thrones of Europe as with an earthquake, and French sym- 
pathy went out where liberty made her stand. "They are a 
generous people," wrote Franklin, "they do not like to hear 



[19 1 

of advantages in return for their aid. They desire the 
of helping us." France has that glory, and more. Le 
column Vendome fall, and the memory of the butcher, 
mankind fade away; the great things that France has dc 
for freedom will make her honored of the nations, whih 
with increasing and increasing meaning, rings through tht 
ages the cry with which she turned to the thunder-burst of 
Valmy: "Live the people !" 

Beset by difficulties from which we are happily exempt — 
on the one side those who dre un of bringing back the 
middle ages, on the other the red specter; compelled, or in 
fancy compelled, by the legacy of old hates to maintain that 
nightmare of prosperity and de;! 'Ily foe of freedom, a large 
standing army — France has yet str adily made progress. Italy 
is one; the great Germanic race at last have unity; as out 
of a trance, life stirs in Spain; Russia moves as she marches. 
May it not be France's to again show Europe the way ? 



Fellow-citizens: If I have sought rather to appeal to 
thought than to flatter vanity, it is not that I do not see the 
greatness and feel the love of my country. Drawing my 
first breath almost within the shadow of Independence Hall, 
the cherished traditions of ihe Republic entwine themselves 
with my earliest recollections, and her flag symbolizes to 
me all that I hold dear on earth. But for the very love I 
bear her, for the very memories I cherish, I would not dare 
come before you on this day and ignore the dangers I see 
in her path. 

If I have not dwelt on her material greatness or pictured 
her future growth, it is because there rises before me a 
higher ideal of what this Republic may be than can be 
expressed in material symbols — an ideal so glorious that, 
beside it, all that we now pride ourselves on seems mean 
and pitiful. That ideal is not satisfied with a republic 
where, with all the enormous gains in productive power, 
labor is ground down to a bare living and must think the 
chance to work a favor ; it is not satisfied with a republic 
where prisons are crowded and almshouses are built and 
families are housed in tiers. It is not satisfied with a 
republic where one tenant for a day can warn his co-tenants 
ofi' of more of the surface of this rolling sphere than he is 
using or can use, or compel them to pay him for the bounty 
of their common Creator ; it is not satisfied with a republic 
where the fear of poverty on the one hand and the sight of 
great wealth on the other makes the lives of so many such 



I 



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pr> 



LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 



011 801 794 8 



pier, 

auf^'ul straining, keeps eyes <> the ground that might be 

in^d to the stars, and suhrntutes the worship of the 

s den Calf for that of the Li\ ing God! 

- 1 hopes for a republic where all shall have plenty, where 

.ch may sit under his vine and fig tree, with none to vex 

lim or make him afraid ; where with want shall gradually 

disappear vice and crime ; whore men shall cease to spend 

their lives in a struggle to live r in heaping up things they 

cannot take away; where talent onall be greater than wealth 

and character greater than talent, and where each may find 

free scope to develop body, mind and soul. 



Is this the dream of dreamers ? One brought to the 
world the message that it might be reality. But they cruci- 
fied him between Uvo thieves. 

Not till it accepts that message can the world have peace. 
Look over the history of the past. What is it but a record 
of the woes inflicted by man on man, of wrong producing 
wrong, and crime fresh crime ? It must be so till justice is 
acknowledged and liberty is law. 

Some things have we done, but not all. In the words 
with which an eminent Frenchman closes the history of that 
great revolution that followed ours: "Liberty is not yet 
here ; but she will come!" 

Fellow-citizens, let us follow the star that rose above the 
cradle of the Republic; let us try our laws by the test of the 
Declaration. Let us show to the nations our faith in Liberty, 
nor fear she will lead us astray. 

Who is Liberty that we should doubt her; that we should 
set bounds to her, and say, " Thus far shall thou come and 
no further !" Is she not peace ? is she not prosperity ? is she 
not progress? nay, is she not the goal towards which all pro- 
gress strives ? 

Not here; but yet she cometh ! Saints have seen her in 
their visions; seers have seen her in their trance. To heroes 
has she spoken, and their hearts were strong; to martyrs 
and the flames were cool ! 

She is not here, but yet she cometh. Lo ! her feet are on 
the mountains — the call of her clarions ring on every breeze; 
the banners of her dawning fret the sky ! Who will 
hear her as she calleth; who will bid her come and welcome ? 
Who will turn to her ? who will speak for her ? who will stand 
for her while she yet hath need ? 

laoius' PriBl, 603 CUy St., S. *'. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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